IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Five or six years ago I tried blogging. We lived across the RR track, right next to the RR track, our too picturesque view of the world being the RR track and beyond it the large warehouse of a large dry cleaning establishment into which I never saw a single customer walk, which let the letters of its neon sign evaporate into the ozone one by one before closing up shop, and as part of an old edition of Bigsofa I made a page called Across the RR tracks then decided to convert it to a blog. I had worked up a nice graphic of a RR track and a decent layout. I set up the blog at Blogger. I got up maybe two or three mundane posts with great difficulty as Blogger didn’t like to work for me, and then couldn’t get it to work again, which a number of people were complaining about at the time, that Blogger had completely broken on them or they could only get it to work occasionally. It was then a fairly unreliable service. I tried again for a little while but was uninspired also by the blogging community. Either I didn’t know my way to certain parts or what I was looking for just wasn’t there yet. If there was a progressive political closet I didn’t find it and six years ago there weren’t many doors to knock on. Saying I was unimpressed sounds judgmental when the situation was that the usual subjects weren’t any I felt moved to link to, or follow or comment upon. I see a couple of the same voices out there doing politically-based blogs now but they weren’t blogging politics back then.

Who were the archibloggers in progressive politics?

Two years ago I started thinking of doing MT.

PHP scared me. I worried about a database going down, disintegrating, and losing everything.

Sticking with HTML, I started an online journal for H.o.p. a year ago in a homeschool blog community. A Reason for Being was to record things for H.o.p. we came across on the web and also for me to record things for him from the time that he might want to read about in the future, and if I did it online I knew I’d be less likely to daily complain about the usual warty existence hogs with which many of us think we have unique conversation (some of us do). A Reason for Being was thinking I might connect with progressive, eclectic homeschoolers who homeschooled because they didn’t want their child going through the school hell they’d gone through, didn’t want their child’s mind programmed by the State, and maybe, like me, had a child who would have been at odds with authority from day one (he didn’t get it from me, I didn’t start getting into intentional trouble until I was ten, though I was unintentionally in trouble from the beginning). We weren’t homeschooling for success. H.o.p. does things his own way and will never be in a Spelling Bee. We weren’t homeschooling for religious reasons and I didn’t set up the journal as a blog with a comments feature because the homeschoolers who blogged were usually homeschooling for reasons contrary to my own and I didn’t see any reason for us to be commenting on each other.

Though it was H.o.p.’s journal, set up for recording his favored links and things I thought he might want to read about when he’d grown up (plus it provided a little news for family), it became increasingly a place for me to post about Iraq and Bushdom and the upcoming election. I didn’t post a lot of what I was thinking about because it was H.o.p.’s journal and I didn’t want him clicking a link and ending up viewing atrocities. We talk politics and some about war around H.o.p. but we don’t expose him to certain aspects. Once he glimpsed over my shoulder the Abu-Gharib photo of a man with a bag over his head, standing on a box, his forced position curiously reminiscent of a martyred saint, curious because of the xtian beliefs or background many Americans in Iraq may hold. That invited confusion and mom trying to explain government and thugs not just torturing but intentional dehumainzation. I didn’t want him randomly clicking links on his blog thinking one was going to lead to elephants or sphinxes and landing in the Iraqi Theater of Blood.

I had happily found progressives blogging on the upcoming election and though I knew better than to be hopeful, believing Bush had it in the bag by hook or by black box ballot, I permitted myself optimism. I was excited about the blogs I was reading. The immediacy of them and wealth of well-written commentary. There’s a troll with every bridge and hill, I know, but never mind.

I knew better than to be hopeful about the elections.

Years ago, back when I was young and about as cynical as I am now, I was sitting one night in a Country and Western lounge. I’m not the Country and Western type. My husband is a musician and the C/W gig was a matter of income. The lead singer was a Vietnam war vet who never talked about the Vietnam war. The place was a small dive on the other side of a 24 hour restaurant at a motel where construction workers stayed while working away from home. It was popular in the way C/W lounges with an illuminated disco floor the size of a child’s wading pool and a good band can make and keep a lounge popular even when the toilets are always backing up and flowing over into the restaurant. It was painful but I met also a few interesting people I’d not have met anywhere else.

Anyway, the bass guitarist and husband and I were sitting watching the returns on the Carter/Reagan election (told you this was a while back). We were watching the election returns in this C/W bar where the C/W patrons were, for the greater part, filtering awareness through the sheen of speed and coke and Jack Daniels, and though the television was on and tuned to politics during the band breaks I don’t recollect if anyone else was watching except for me and my husband and the bass player who unabashedly broke down in tears when Reagan won. Hands clutching beer bottle, he disintegrated. Said not a word, just cried. I thought, well, there goes our future. I didn’t know how citizens could be duped into voting for policies that would squander their future, but it had happened and I decided then that elections were a sham and what most people wanted was a Big Daddy Hollywood sham artful smile. They would sooner eat easy lies any day than hard truths. Eat what didn’t challenge. What they wanted was to preserve the suburban status quo, to get back what they could feel slipping away beneath their feet, to cast it in concrete and not blow away like the rest they were dooming in their ethical dustbowl. The bass player cried and I knew I was right, that the future was down the tubes for people like us. Not just four years of it. The long haul.

Five years ago I knew not to be naive but we had two-year-old son who I wanted to impress upon an idea of possible hope and community interest, didn’t want his earliest memories to be of mom being cynical-pessimist, and we took him down to watch us vote. Georgia was a Gone State, already slated for Bush, but our election booth territory was managed by people who even under those harsh greening school cafeteria fluorescent lights looked heart-warmingly god-damned happy to see us there though we were obviously not conservative, they looked so god-damned happy to see H.o.p. there as a toddler student of democracy, they looked so god-damned thrilled that everyone there was taking part in the process and that they could help, they looked like people with faith in weights and balances and the casting of the ballot. They smiled ear-t0-ear and looked so god-damn happy to see us they might’ve even asked for photo ID and I might’ve even complied without thinking twice (photo ID not necessary in Georgia until recently) because they all looked so blissed smiling wide at everyone and because I was in from the sticks not having voted since Reagan first won. As Georgia was Republican-occupied territory, our vote was for Nader, hoping to break out of the two party system. We put our “I’ve voted” sticker on our beaten up van because to us those were our “We voted against Bush” testimonials.

Last fall, I knew not to be naive. I felt the Bush camp would arrange a Bush win one way or another. But I guess because sometimes you’ve got to I also permitted myself hope over Kerry though he too often infuriated me during the debates. Too conservative. But he wasn’t Bush. Bush has a brain so I can’t say that Kerry had one and Bush didn’t. I think I was excited watching the debates because I couldn’t rationally see how anyone out there–anyone–could possibly not be horrified by lying, sneering, contemptuous Bush not even attempting to look like he gave a shit, like he didn’t already have the election wrapped up in a Diebold box. I couldn’t see how anyone wouldn’t be infuriated by Bush meeting them at the lowest common denominator possible. I knew too that people were chowing down Bush wholesale, contusing lies and sneering contempt with manly no-grays-allowed leadership.

Election day came. I was more than ambivalent. We had a sense of imperative-but-lost-mission.

Still, what pre-election provided was a shard of hope. A “maybe in spite of”. Or just another sham that one purchases because living in Philip K. Dick’s “Radio Free Albemuth” kills the spirit. Afterwards? I wasn’t immediately depressed over it. My depression over the situation set in later. What’s to do when there’s nothing to do. When there’s Bush, and the Senate is Republican and the House is Republican and Georgia is Republican through and through and you don’t trust Democrats anyway because they’re mostly voting damn Republican. When you don’t believe in the process also partly because part (small part here, but a part) of your ancestry got rubbed out by America’s so-called from Sea to Shining Sea Freedom Road that hypocritically flung American Indians in the trash because it was part of manifest xtian corporate destiny, the too-bad had-to-do for sake of Freedom’s Empire.

Bah humbug. When others are talking about “loss of freedoms” I’m thinking, yeah, uh-huh, right, think about the fundamental lies that the house is set upon and and think again. But I say it too, “Look at what has been done to our freedoms”, because that’s where I’m at as a twenty-first century citizen. And my thinking has been that America doesn’t stand a chance until it honestly admits the truth of its land/freedom base rather than not excusing by excusing with had-to-be and winner takes all as a matter of might and sleight-of-hand and disappearing ink making right.

I thought what’s the point in blogging. Not in general. Personally. Then I thought, come February, build a podium and climb up on it with the rest of them because it’s not a matter of what’s the point, it’s a matter of not stopping talking or acting, even if no one’s reading or listening, if no one’s talking with or back at you, keep on talking because if one doesn’t then it’s too easy to settle into the losing or winning ethic that Mediagirl was blogging about the other day. Accept that it never and didn’t and never will matter if one speaks, doesn’t matter what one has to say and thus what one’s thoughts are, accept that there’s no point, and then there one is, a purchaser of the ethic that winning is all.

The last thing I want my son growing up without is respect for his voice and his thoughts.

Back in the early 80s, there was a lower economic area of Buckhead that began to eat itself in the hopes of attaining glory. We lived in the area right before it began to chow down. The name of the apartment “complex” may have been Oak Hill. My husband thinks it may have been Oak Hill. I don’t have a clue. And he’s not certain because that isn’t how it was known. Its common name was “Viet Cong Villa”. The buildings were dark red brick, each consisting of, if I remember correctly, 4 to 6 townhome type apartments (upstairs and down), either two or three bedrooms, probably built in the 40s. The Emory family-student housing complex was in the same style, the one they tore down and replaced around the time of the Olympics.

The name “Viet Cong Villa” should clue in as to the neighborhood. I don’t know why but a large number of Vietnamese families had settled in the complex. Extended families of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. There was also a significant-sized “hispanic” community and a number of other nationalities. In our little cul-de-sac we were the only household with English as the primary language. The two apartments on our left were Vietnamese. The one on our right was Hispanic. The next building was all Vietnamese with the exception of one German family. The complex was probably close to 90 percent Vietnamese and Hispanic.

Between 1975 and 1984 about 8000 Vietnamese arrived in Georgia as refugees, poor, bewildered, struggling to cope with new culture. One set of my grandparents lived in southwestern Missouri and a number of Vietnamese had landed there as well, not quite so easy to overlook, seeming like a wayward flock of birds blown off course by a storm, about as inobvious as if if you were watching Shirley Jones and Robert Preston in “Music Man” and suddenly there was this group of Vietnamese extras in the background who you could swear weren’t within two worlds of the parade your last viewing. But there are a lot more buildings in Atlanta where the roads snake around and about instead of squaring off in neat orderly blocks, and those faces disappeared into the fringes in the midst of the city, hidden in the nicks and tucks of those roads, such as at Oak Hill, the entrance to which was deftly hidden in plain view at a stop light at an imposing RR trestle that served as a gate to Piedmont Road’s ascendance into Buckhead. Most people we knew or know never realized the apartment complex even existed.

The apartments, as far as I was concerned, were quite nice. Walk in and there were the stairs to the second-floor and then a decent-sized open living/dining room area. The kitchen was to the rear, had a stove/oven and refrigerator that worked and also a small pantry for storage. Upstairs was the bath and the bedrooms. Some of the walls were plaster and some sheet rock, and as there was more plaster than sheet rock the apartment had that solid feel persevering feel that comes with plaster. The windowsills were deep, the center windows large, and the side windows all opened with a hand crank. The flooring downstairs was a godawful but tolerable vinyl. The upstairs flooring was real wood. The bath was old tile. The stairs were so worn that I fell down them, from the top all the way to the bottom, several times. Always, I landed in a frightfully contorted heap with half my body stretching up the front door and my husband would come running in thinking I’d broken my neck. Each time I fell I happened to be carrying a cup of hot coffee or tea, and each time I remember thinking I didn’t want to spill that hot coffee or tea all over me. And never once, falling down those steps, did I spill a drop. As I fell down the steps I always somehow managed to set down my cup.

Without speaking a word to each other, only nodding, it still managed to be a friendly cul-de-sac. Except for the teen-age hopeful drummers who practiced in the afternoons, it was surprisingly quiet. One may wonder how we ended up scarcely speaking a word to the neighbors, only nodding, but that’s the way it was, and one never heard English spoken. If you heard anyone speaking English outside it was so unusual you’d go look to see what was going on. We were usually on the road but I don’t think it would have been different had we lived there full-time.

I have no idea who the owners were. Management was a single white guy who lived in one of the front buildings. If you lodged a complaint, nothing ever went unattended for more than a day or two.

The apartments lined several tree-lined streets that were widely spaced. There were no back porches or private yards. Instead there was a large, sprawling communal area out the back doors. It was a grassy little valley where there were no trees, the grass always well-tended, not muddy. A basketball hoop where the teenage boys played was behind our apartment, and there was a small childrens’ play area in another part of the complex.

One day one of the apartments back behind us, across that little valley, put up a small enclosed back porch area. Cheap screening with a rippled green fiberglass roof and a cheap screen door. Within a month it seemed nearly every other apartment had put up the same style back porch area and then everyone had small bar-b-ques that they cooked on and sat outside early evenings during the summer months.

The apartments were warm in the winter but were beastly hot in the summer. There was no built-in AC and few had window units. We didn’t. No one else in our cul-de-sac did. This was the early 80s and most left their apartment doors open all night during the summer. I remember more than once, the upstairs an oven, seeking some relief from the heat by sleeping on the linoleum floor downstairs. It seemed just plain crazy that in the middle of Atlanta you could leave your front door wide open all night without anyone seeing that as an invitation to walk off with all your belongings, but we were shortly leaving our door open as well.

One time we returned after a couple of weeks on the road to find that our back door had been open the entire time. One of us had forgotten to lock it and a cat had gained entrance. A white cat. Shed a lot of white fur all over the furniture and the bed but that was it. It was the only place we lived in where we never had a break-in or anyone stealing anything from outside. The only trouble we did personally have was once we came back after a week out, 4 or 5 am, were happy as we’d finally saved enough money to get our car fixed, were looking forward to getting it running again, we went to bed and next thing we knew the police were visiting outside, all the cars vandalized, headlights smashed, tires slashed. We didn’t have the money to fix the car plus buy tires.

Before we moved out there had begun to be talk of gangs and there were two more predawn incidents in the parking lot, gunfire finally, blue police lights filling the upstairs front bedroom. An air conditioning unit immediately appeared in the upstairs of an apartment across the street. People began closing their doors. I don’t know where we first heard about gangs moving in. Some things you remember like that and others it seems like one day you know, you breathe in and there’s news in the air which becomes knowledge that seems a priori, no questioning how you ever came to know as it was as natural as breathing. I do remember that no one was talking about Vietnamese gangs yet in Atlanta. The night of the last incident, I was dreaming that I had entered the front upstairs bedroom and looked down to see myself dancing in the street in blue-green light. Which is when I woke up and went into the front bedroom, blue light playing on the white walls, and stood a long while looking down at the police cars.

The strip mall next door (across an access to Buford Highway) had stores and restaurants that served the different communities. The theater had been one of the few in Atlanta that showed alternative films back then. On the weekends and late nights they showed martial arts films, not dubbed. The lines were long.

On the other side of the strip mall was another apartment complex, newer, early 70s vintage, already sagging, that was almost entirely Hispanic. A couple of blocks down a side street one started to get into the sex district. Across the road from our complex was Atlanta’s one Church of Scientology. An odd building that was part house. When they moved out a kindergarten center took it over and stapled on a pink tower so everyone would know there were children there.

I didn’t feel a very good neighbor around the Vietnamese families. I was staggering a lot around there, and when I went out to walk the dog and couldn’t walk I felt rather obvious. Indeed, it was so quiet there (to me) and I felt so obvious that the clanking of the bottles I tossed into the dempsey dumpster late at night unnerved me. I didn’t want the neighbors with their families of children and grandparents to hear them. So one night at around three am I found myself sensibly digging a hole in the garden under a neighbor’s window where I could bury my bottles in peace. I woke up a bit as I dug and stopped and thought what am I doing because I couldn’t remember, and then I remembered and I thought to myself y’know this isn’t exactly normal. I was off the road by then and was supposedly, hopefully trying to stop doing this kind of thing. Having already been hospitalized and kicked out after smuggling in alcohol and drinking on Antabuse (goodbye, you’re hopeless, we’re not going to be responsible) I figured I’d be dead in a couple of months.

I was, I felt, a sensible insensible drinker. With my hair cropped close to my head and my leather cap and jacket I felt I was less noticeable playing tag with the cars on the highway as I made my way across from the liquor store. A woman with long hair I thought now that would be a stand out in the sun obvious bit of staggering news crossing the highway. But not me. I thought I was considerate, forgoing my authentic stiletto 60s heels for tennis shoes because I was aware I wasn’t too steady on my feet and didn’t want anyone having to rake me up off the road.

I read horrifying things about Vietnam during those years. Things I’d not heard before, some things I’ve not read published since. I’d known Vietnam Veterans but none had ever talked about the war. I had known about My Lai. It was big news in Georgia as Calley was from Georgia. But for all the media coverage, the photos, one still never read in graphic terms the one-on-one American against Vietnamese violence, and though I took for granted a lot there were things I read that would never have occurred to me. It had only been five or six years since, in high school, I’d watched on the news the chaos of the evacuation of Saigon. Desperate crowds you know are composed of desperate individuals but the camera never settles long or close enough to get too personal.

The early 80s had its own set of horrors that sank to the bottom of America’s media pit where news is news for an instant then gone. Bits and pieces were little knife points sticking up through the newsprint from Central and South American that John Travolta and disco balls and the shrieking sopranos of the BeeGees kept converting into part of the splintered, sparkly bedazzle along with Reagan smiling smiling and George H. W. Bush. Reading between the lines would sometimes eventually coalesce into a more detailed story in alternative publications. I read up on fascism as best as I could, going through the libraries, carrying armloads of books with me on the road. For some reason there didn’t seem a lot available in Atlanta, or not as much as I wanted, and here I was forgetting and leaving books at motels.

In 1981 “Mad Max” was released in America, the same year Negroponte was appointedAmbassador to Honduras.

J. Emmett Winn writes in “Mad Max, Reaganism and the Road Warrior”:

These films entered the US during a period of renewed nationalistic interest and conservatism linked with the Reagan/Bush administrations… The Road Warrior was very successful in the US at a time when Reaganism touted the need to “right” the social order and build a conservative nationalism that could thwart the supposed threat posed by multiculturalism. Simultaneously, it provided the violent white male hero of Western mythology who would rid the hegemonic “space” of the “deviants” threatening the dominant elite

I don’t recollect the first time I saw “Mad Max” but I was likely not all there and just got the feeling of grit in my teeth. The second time would not have been too long later and I remember watching and thinking, “Oh, uh, this doesn’t seem to be what I thought it might have been,” though I couldn’t much remember what I thought it might have been. The first time, there’d just been a sense of punk rage blowing in off the desert and it got high marks for not being disco. Almost everything was damn disco or an exercise video dressed up to look like something else and “Mad Max” wasn’t that.

I read on the internet an individual being mystified at the supposed punk cult following that Mad Max had. But I don’t know that Mad Max had really a punk following.

One felt like one was living in a desert wasteland. And having grown up partly in the desert, and loving the desert, I mean the cultural and political waste of the time. If you came out of the 70s there was the sense your older brother and sister hippies had gone and left you in the lurch. By the time you were out of high school social and political consciousness seemed to be eaten up by coke. The future had been ripped out from under one, squandered by this seeming collapse into no-holds-barred greed and a terrifying disregard for a crumbling environment. I remember 1980 very clearly and one felt assaulted, one felt raped by the Reaganites and what they were preparing to do, felt raped and assaulted already because you knew their plans and how they had no boundaries. A detached clip of Mad Max seemed to capture the futility and rage of that abandonment to merciless sneering power but as you sat and watched it became clear the brief clip and the whole book had nothing to do with each other. Mad Max turned down being a hero, disappearing into the desert, but he was no punk, and the villains were being sold as punk, and all that was left was an insane vigilante justice that felt like conservatism out for a long-running, gory, good old time. What the general public, the college boys, the fashion punks saw and identified as raw, as punk, wasn’t Patti Smith, Television, the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop. What they whooped and hollered over was anger dissociated from despair, becoming a violence fetish instead and a reaffirmation of what I would call the Death Culture of the Reaganites and Bushites. Appearance over substance. Meaning beaten to a black and blue pulp, trussed up in fashion handcuffs and sold as something other than what it is. By the late 80s the alternative paper here was running fashion pieces with models featuring bruised eyes and legs as desirable, coquettish, apparently perceiving no conflict with occasional stories on violence against women, which I don’t think is another story but is part of the continuum.

The fetishism of violence seems to me always to do with subversion and denial of despair.

On 6 March 1978 Larry Flynt was paralyzed during an assassination attempt. On 27 Nov 1978 the Mayor of San Francisco and Harvey Milk had been assassinated. On December 8, 1980 Chapman murdered Lennon. On Oct 6 1981 Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, was assassinated. On March 30 1981 there was the assassination bid on Reagan that missed his heart and got Press Secretary Jim Brady’s head. On May 13 1981 there was an assassination bid on the pope. It wasn’t exactly the most settled of times. Conservative, nihilistic, Hollywood gold punk gunk came crawling out of the confusion with Reagan at the helm, waving like a beauty queen and there was nothing ironic about it that rapture ecstasies trumped faith in realism. Yes, I know my view on nihilism isn’t typical. I know that Reagan was billed as the antidote to nihilism. I don’t think what’s regarded normally as nihilism is what it’s purported to be, and is instead realism stomped on and repackaged as unprincipaled sullen joy in doom and gloom. The way I looked on it in the early 80s was if what’s billed as nihilism is unprincipaled and valueless, then Reagan was its muscled mardi gras king. I remember looking out the front window of the “Viet Cong Villa” apartment, it was a sunny day, summer, and Reagan and his grand nihilistic parade constellated in the shimmering ether (I believe this was while I was getting sober), and I don’t know why I was seeing Schwarzenegger as his body-double riding the same float, don’t know what had happened to cause him to be on my mind, but he was there too. The parade was furiously vaporizing the omnipresent drizzle that had darkened the parade route since the hippies and their flowers had vacated it. Annointed in ask-me-no-questions oil, dazzling, the float hunted down every party-pooping pessimistic that shirked the parade route, zapped away their cloud with global warming and careened off, laughing, vindicated followers cheering wildly.

Was the damndest thing I ever saw.

I got sober in 1982 or 1983. I know one is expected to keep a track on that, but I’m not good with remembering numbers and I stopped worrying about the exact date a long while ago. Became just 1982 or 1983. We moved out of Oak Hill or whatever it’s real name was as we’d heard the place was due to be torn down and while moving out came upon stashes of pills and bottles I’d hidden away in stupors as security then forgotten about. The apartment complex was torn out, one part then another. Bulldozed and businesses installed and more and more businesses installed near it, trying to pull the glory aura of Buckhead down down the hill to the RR tracks and beyond. But it all went flat. A high profile strip club, appropriately named the Gold Club, at its peak during the Olympics, kept the area alive for a while. Now the strip club is gone. Scandal took care of it, I guess after it had served its purpose. Some congregation, determined to illustrate how Jesus covers sin with righteousness, made the building their church home, a god club, draping the mirrors with gold fabric. Whatever happened to them I don’t know but they’re gone now. And finally the strip mall is gone. That part of town which had just been different before now looks desolate.

Not doing the Hooters jiggle

This is a long post. As long as it is because it’s a subject I didn’t want to occasion any sense of trivialization, which I felt was happening in an initial shorter version.

The Maidenform dream and the election train

Alicublog makes the post Guy Thing in response to Sex, Women and Conservatism by Dallas Claymore at the Citizen Journal.

In the meanwhile, that Internet philosopher, “Free online casino” attempted to comment on this website,

When women forge their own ‘gender identity’, in the way the feminists recommend, they become unattractive to men - or attractive only as sex objects, not as individual persons. And when men cease to be gentlemen, they become unattractive to women. Sexual companionship then goes from the world. by free online casino game

The Free Online Casino philosopher is exceedingly prolific. It’s also got an unnerving bit of oracle bot to it that at the crankiest of times anticipates where the brain is wandering and plunges right through the looking glass dragging along PKD, John Cage and Timothy Leary into electric lands of internet potshot I Ching where Satan as opposer says “J’accuse” pointing at yon mountain which is you of course, all being you, you being god is all, and Satan having a high old time crashing every righteous brain party it predicts in your future. Up conjuring down, left conjuring right, in conjuring out, the bases are covered and what’s frustrating is Anti doesn’t believe a word of it, Anti’s just there for sake of making sure there’s a position to be established. If Anti believes in anything it’s making maps.

I’ve been working on this sorry post several days only to have it twice destroyed by my not saving and my DSL going down and taking my work with it. I thought maybe I should drop the post entirely but I kept going back and looking at the graphic of Ms. Snake Minoan I’d made and thinking what would your typical Hooters customers do if this woman walked in the door, and what would she do if handed a Hooters t-shirt and shorts and told to sing “I wish I was an Oscar Meier Wiener” for her supper. I’ve no idea what her response would be as little is known about the Minoans, but she doesn’t look the cheery and reassuring Malibu Barbie performing a snake goddess dance.

How did she come to mind? A how’d we get from here to here kind of thing, from her to Maidenform to Hooters. She came to mind because of all the “I dreamt I was” Maidenform ads that are popular for blog headings, and which do beg reflection as to their meaning, suggesting a secret almost mystical strength via the magic cups or what’s contained, while also back-slapping with the contorted gender politics of the time, such as if there’d been a Maleform man he would never have dreamt adventures in his jockstrap, he would have declared them done. Ida Rosenthal’s “I dreamt” was not only a great ad campaign that made every woman a potential star in her own life, one could argue or suppose it was pretty future feminist, the ads acting upon the notion women wanted other roles than what post WWII suburban America had been offering them after the soldiers came home and they were retired from the work force. The WWII posters showed Rosie the Riveter with her hair bound to keep it out of the production line machinary. The women may not now have been adventuring, but they were dreaming, maybe they would get past the production line and not only would the bra not get in the way, hey, Maidenform will make sure you’re comfortable enough to be a contender (comfort was a selling point and can’t be overlooked).

But the campaign got it wrong,wrong, wrong in the way the boob wars are going to go wrong when you drape a dreamy Maidenform mannekin FDR style over the caboose rail of a campaign train declaring that her bra won her the dream election.

When women burned their bras

I’m obviously not real bright. Because I gotta tell you, when I was ten years of age and saw, in the World Book Encyclopedia, under “fashion”, Ms. Minoan without a bra, I was surprised. She was an illustration and held no snakes and the only thing on her head was hair. No poppies, no owls, no lion cubs, or whatever is supposed to be perched up there or not (though the poppies I believe are part of the package). Being a child of the 60s I had the idea that bras in their then present form were probably as old as civilization. No one had ever told me otherwise and as I was not yet of age to wear a bra I honestly hadn’t given them much thought. Then when I was eleven or twelve, my then best friend Danielle and I were watching our favorite show, “That Girl”, which was our favorite show because it was about a woman living in New York trying hard to land a real job as an actress. What can I tell you, television didn’t have much to offer and this was a pass at a “liberated” female who was always getting in trouble and breaking down in tears kinda but not like Lucy Ricardo. Danielle’s parents owned a clothing boutique that they stocked via frequent trips to New York (may as well have lived there), so this show was something with which we could quasi connect because the focus of the show was on New York and on clothes, which I didn’t have but I appreciated how they were central to Danielle’s life, being how her parents stocked the refrigerator, though “That Girl’s” focus on clothing didn’t sink in until I was older and caught a rerun and saw how Marlo had a new and completely detailed outfit on in nearly every scene, shoes and hat and gloves.

Anyway, we were watching the season opener on Danielle’s very own television in her room and Danielle shrieked and covered her eyes and I stared hard at the television screen wondering what had her so grossed out. Whatever it was, it was one of the most horrifying things Danielle had ever seen in her life because she said she couldn’t watch, that’s how horrible it was. “It” being, I realized, Marlo’s untethered breasts bouncing under a tight sweater as she ran toward the camera. I’d observed but hadn’t appropriately grasped how horrid this was, how udderly depraved Marlo was, how she had sunk to the lowest of get me my Neilson ratings lows unsheathing herself in that manner. Danielle said she couldn’t watch. I’d never observed a woman bouncing around like that and was curious to see more. Observing how breasts behaved unsheathed, when you’d never seen it before, was quite a revelation. You bounced down and they vigorously bounced up. Indeed, they were like monster twin children who are determined to have their own say. At least, that’s what I realized Danielle and some other saw it as. Breasts without controlled management be sea monsters grappling with the maiden ship. Danielle burrowing under the blanket in response to Marlo’s breasts, I thought, Gads, that’s powerful in the way of the repercussion it generates.

I also thought “Marlo has surprisingly large breasts” and knew “That Girl” was going down the tubes. Marlo looked chock-full-o’-proud in a way Marilyn Monroe never had. For it was one thing to be appreciative of the sway of your assets. Another thing to say they were yours. Because I have to say this, at least to an eleven or twelve-year-old, the flags Marlo was joyfully waving had “Don’t tread on me” stamped on them in the way Ms. Minoan looks like she’s unlikely to be pinched without delivering a mean return bite that atrophies the offending hand. “That Girl” had grown up and was bound for the dust bin.

Plus, it wasn’t a very good show. Not to me, at least, when I was older (or maybe it was and I caught a couple particularly bad episodes in rerun). When I was eleven, I loved it. But even I knew the breasts meant “That Girl” was a goner.

Marlo took off her bra (and her hat and gloves and car coat) when I was putting my bra on. You don’t grow up with a bra dangled in front of your face daily and have it not become an initiation rite. Danielle and I didn’t compare progress daily, and I assumed it was because she was Danielle and not because she was Jewish (maybe, I wasn’t sure), but a breast fanatical Roman Catholic friend of mine who didn’t believe in god as much as she believed in the pope had no such reservations and we did measure. Religiously (indeed) we took our measurements for at least a week, which is a long time when you’re that age, long enough to mark a stage. The bra meant you were on your way to womanhood because it was time to cover it up. Menstruation meant that too but it was a shameful, bloody business you did your extra best to hide–though I was over that by the time I was fourteen and some girls pulled me aside to tell me not to go to my fringed leather bag because some boys had been through it looking for gum and found gasp y’know the artifacts of bloody business, so of course I wouldn’t want them to know it was my bag, and I thought screw the baby shit they’re the ones who ought to be embarrassed for invading my privacy and I picked up my bag and walked off and instead of the guys guffawing there was dead silence.

Really, it was one of those long walk moments. My bag was all the way across the room. There was this side of the room where everyone had rushed to upon the opening of the bag while I was somewhere where school policy had it you couldn’t take your bag along. The girls didn’t want anyone thinking it was theirs. The guys were embarrassed but also ha-ha and waiting to lacerate with barbs the girl who claimed the bag. As I began to enter the room I was pulled out by peers hoping to protect me. I instead walked all……that…….long……way…….across……the……floor……to my bag and its tampons and took ownership of it.

The Sacred Wisdom

I submitted to the bra until I was sixteen and then shed its pinching ways. No matter how comfortable the then new “natural” bras were supposed to be, which were supposed to look like no bra, they weren’t like no bra. I thought surely all other girls my age would be shedding theirs too as it seemed the most sensible thing to do. But culture still wanted bras, still identified girls who didn’t wear them as possibly loose as the bra they’d shed. And, even worse, there was the specter of sagging.

Yes, I remember a teacher, who read every issue of Ms. magazine, who had a Gloria Stienem hairdo, having an earnest Episcopalian talk with a friend of mine and telling her one thing she greatly regretted was ever removing her bra for a moment because her breasts now sagged, and so would my friend’s breasts if she took her bra off for a weekend. “Don’t do it!” There was nothing worse in the world than sagging, a condition which bras prevented. Once you sagged you could never get the unsag back. Which was sinful. How was it sinful? The same way tattoos were sinful back then. God had given you plain old skin and if it was meant to be tattooed he would have tattooed it. It was blasphemy against god’s creation to stick holes in it and alter it. If you didn’t wear the bra you weren’t doing your part in preventing god’s creation going awry and sagging.

That was the fundamental rationale. It was the dividing line between xtians and heathen savages who played with their bodies in all kinds of undoable ways, piercing and tattooing. My thesis is that it was sinful to pierce and paint because piercing and painting are largely clan identifiers historically, and xtianity’s business was to kill clan-ways which had often enough what xtianity identified as ancestral “gods” attached to them. Piercing and painting got in the way of xtianity’s homogenization of “god”, promoting clan over the body of christ.

Eventually, the secret wisdom was passed along that if you could put a pencil under your breast and it dropped then you could go braless if you were the type to do it. I passed the test in what many would consider the wrong direction. What can I say but I never had to worry about a bra, which was good because I hated them, plus they were just another clothing expense and who had the money to waste.

It’s a sad state of affairs when womanly wisdom amounts to a pencil test.

I was not a feminist. Though I came of age in the 70s, Feminism seemed old, out-of-step and irrelevant to me. Issues did not. Feminism did. Where I was, Feminism was Gloria Steinem in a particular pair of cool glasses and a particular cool hair style. The librarian at the high school was feminist. She loaned me her feminism magazines thinking I’d enjoy them. I have a way of losing books, but I lost those magazines in a legitimate way that should have had her more concerned about the how of my losing them than my having lost them. What she cared about was that I couldn’t give her back her Ms. magazines. She yelled at me. “Fuck you,” I thought. And the hair and the glasses and Feminist babes telling teens we too could be all that if we had, once again, the just right assets. Fuck feminism. I had the idea it was just plain abuse of power that was the primary problem and feminism seemed to me environmentalists worrying about the water quality of a pool a step away from a problematic polluted fountain head. I failed to credit what feminism had done, but I was one of those teens who didn’t like a group-id and had honestly no idols that weren’t ideas. I didn’t like the cult of personality. Academia and publishing and the arts seemed to me all about the cult of personality and selling yours over someone else’s. I didn’t want a contest. I didn’t want to put on anyone’s buttons or wear anyone’s slogans.

I was a really pissed off, cocky teen who didn’t trust anyone. (Husband–who knew me then–peeks over my shoulder and says I’m exaggerating, that I wanted to trust people but didn’t and that I was cocky because I had to be to survive. Never-the-less, I was still a cocky teen who didn’t trust anyone.)

But I had my line of reasoning. Thank you, yes, I could have an abortion if I ever needed/wanted one but I saw everything in terms of individual, personal rights rather than feminist issues.

I didn’t see it in terms of sex rights, of academic rights, just another people power drama

When one of my college professors called me into her office to tell me she thought I ought to be aware that she’d heard another professor of mine telling my other professors that I’d had it too easy and it was time to come down hard on me, she said she didn’t know what had happened but she was prepared to go to the Dean for me, though she wasn’t sure if that would do anything to help as she was being pushed out of the school because of a divide as to what they believed constituted an education and what she believed was an education.

I didn’t tell her what had happened, which was my saying, “No” to professor in question, and his saying, “Let’s forget this ever happened”. It had been an intense event emotionally and had taken me two months to be able to hear his voice without becoming nauseated, without stopping breathing, without breaking into a cold sweat. It was an intense event because I’d known him for years and two weeks before when his shod foot had brushed against my shod foot under a desk I had thought, “Is he coming on to me?” and then thought, no, couldn’t possibly be, I moved my foot back and his foot didn’t pursue and I decided it was my imagination. It had been tough enough finishing up an independent study under him (which is when Main Event happened, when he went from being on the other side of the room one moment to suddenly on top of me, which I avoided by turning, was petrified and stared at the door for fifteen minutes until he quit trying to convince, until he realized I was not going to be convinced and said “Let’s forget this ever happened”, and I nodded my head yes that I would forget this had happened and made my break for it when he stood and let go my legs which he’d not been feeling up but had been holding while trying to talk me into things), and I’d been thinking well I’m home clear because he didn’t go outrageous on me and give me a low mark (which would have been, I realize now, a sure sign something had gone wrong as I made only top marks in English Lit), thinking well I was home clear because I didn’t have any more studies under him. In the meanwhile I’d quit my editor position on the college lit mag as he didn’t forget and he was the advisor and had started playing rough in a sneaky underhanded way. Index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle, the apex of which he tapped against his you’re-eating-shit-now grin, that’s how I remember him and his smile when I stood and walked out of the staff meeting where I felt I’d two choices, either walk or uncover the game he was playing, that he was speaking in double entendres that no one else understood, that he was playing a mental footsie with the repeated, hammered tag-line of “You may have said no but I’ve got other ways of getting my jollies off of you until you decide you’ve had enough of it and leave”. It’s no kudos for me that I walked. Then I noticed attitudes of teachers shifting on me and wondered if it was my imagination until my French professor called me in to speak with her. I thought A event happened a couple of months prior and if I went to the Dean how could I prove B event had anything to do with it all. I knew the man’s wife, knew his kids, and was concerned about their being hurt. This was back in the late 70s and teachers and students and ethics concerning woudn’t be hot news for another few years. I didn’t think of it in terms of sexism, feminism, student’s rights. I thought of it in terms of power brokering, of an individual determined to beat me down and out. I thought too if he was willing to play such hard ball he must not be worried about what the Dean would say if I went to him.

I was an idiot for not going to the Dean.

I was an idiot because he had said “Let’s forget this ever happened,” and I had promised him I would. And because I had promised him I would forget I stupidly had the idea that I had made that promise and couldn’t break it, that I’d agreed to blot it out of my mind. My lung capacity must have been significant in those days because when I’d made the promise I’d gone without taking a full breath for five minutes, knew if I’d taken a full breath I would gasp as my body desperately wanted air, and I didn’t want him feeling or seeing or hearing me gasp, I wanted to be as physically invisible as possible, I was just struggling to maintain as much physical non-presence as I could until he let me loose and I could get out the door and breathe again. The stress of the moment certainly nullified that agreement. A thousand things nullified that agreement.

It was the late 70s and I had the idea that since he’d backed off nothing had happened and didn’t understand why I was as physically frightened as I was, that afterwards I was unable to breathe when around him, that his voice made me feel violently ill. I still had a bit of that “You’re not a complete person as long as you’re a student” thing going, which I’d fought all the way since elementary school, which had kept me in such trouble in school. It was still there.

Two days after my French Professor spoke to me I quit college. I thought maybe one day I’ll go back but knew I had no intention of ever doing so, that I was done with it. I decided I never wanted to be in the position of being student to teacher again. I thought in terms of power over and that the language and set-up was ripe for abuse of power.

Before he’d let me go, by then kneeling at my feet Mr. Professor had said I was strong, “what made you so strong”, which I didn’t take as a compliment. He cried. Some may think, “Poor guy” as if this was an honest moment, except it was my legs he was holding, I have no doubt I wasn’t the first or last this happened to, and this was no swing moment of revelation as in “Holy Smoke” where P. J. Waters puts on a dress and goes screaming into the desert, is released of his demons, becomes whole and no longer a servant to his cowboy boots. I thought about this for years, authoritarianism and its cousins, and the way the authoritarian Nurse Ratchet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” never gives the sense that her personal integrity had ever been violated, when there was simply very little left but Dogma having long-since trumped any shred of the spontaneous individual. What I walked out of college with was a conviction that at the root of all power over politics, of all negative, separationist -isms, was a desire to debase. Rape had nothing to do with sex. Abuse had nothing to do with sex. Instead it was power. You are mine, I control you, was expressed in many ways. The broken horse syndrome. Dominate, make it yours, own it and eat its magic. When the deed is done the magic is never entirely gone. However degraded, a breath of heat of the moment adrenaline remains, possession and repudiation, a peculiar hormonal dinner to be hashed and rehashed.

Initiations are grueling, but initiations into self-power and knowledge are not the same as initiations into group power. Rush Limbaugh was able to say of Abu Ghraib, “”I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?…This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” He was not just saying, “It doesn’t look that bad to me,” he was admitting that this is, indeed, the status quo, acceptable American authority, its construct and maintenance.

Then they went out and got boob jobs

When I was about 25 I was driving down the highway and I saw my first Hooters sign which was between the Atlanta airport and downtown. “This has to be a joke,” I thought. “This can’t be for real. Are women really going to waitress in a restaurant where men go just to ogle their boobs? Won’t they feel slimed? Won’t they feel debased? Won’t women say no I’m not going to serve my breasts up in order to earn a living?”

I’m an idiot.

Hooters was born in Clearwater Florida but Atlanta was its corporate base. Atlanta jumpstarted Hooters into the mainstream. Eventually, Hooters’ waitresses would be making a stellar $13 an hour (I read) as flight attendants, entertaining business class with rousing renditions of “I’m a little tea pot…when I get all steamed up…. pour me out” and “I wish I was an Oscar Meier Weiner”. Tease tease. The Hooters girls would pose in PlayBoy. Be perky for calendars. Tease tease. Walk en masse in Washington for their exclusive rights to be Hooters Girls. I wondered how many Hooter’s girls were told “You do as part of your job or you out of here.” I wondered what kind of contracts they were having to sign. If they got pregnant, what happened to them?

Around that time, a friend of mine went to work for a plastic surgeon. She got a boob job that boosted her to a D cup. Her mother got a boob job. Her sister-in-law got a boob job. My friend later got another boob job that boosted her to a DD. She was in agony, cracking her breasts all the time to make sure they didn’t torn into cement, she described it as torture, but she still went in for the DD. This was somehow empowering. She felt better about herself.

I didn’t get it. Something was going wrong. I’d never once felt inferior because of my breast size. I never once felt deprived because I didn’t have cleavage. I had my own problems with self-image but I knew they were my problems. I suspected if I had been a person with cleavage problems then getting myself some might help short term but not long term or in the way I might need to readjust my attitude about self. I realized I could be wrong but it was disturbing, all these women going under the knife so they could fill out a t-shirt in a way that would make men go “Wow”. I was told they were doing it for themselves, and I understood how that could be true, so they could go “Wow”–but wasn’t it so they could go “Wow” anticipating the men who would go “Wow”? If you didn’t want someone valuing you for your breasts why enhance them? Did being “powerful” mean becoming the play girl in the magazine next to someone’s toilet? Did “They want to have sex with me” mean you’d made your day? Your life?

What had happened since the bra burnings that was driving all these demi-cup women in for breast augmentation? I know I am now being labeled a prude. But for a woman to be somebody it seemed to wind back around to being some body.

A wife of one of the Hooters pioneers created the Hooters logo. In other words, isn’t that grand, they’re all in on it, the women and the men, each want it as much as the other. And perhaps some of them do. And perhaps some of them don’t. The “We enjoy sexism” Hooters creed.

Sex sells, no doubt about it. And people sell sex.

But I haven’t been talking about sex here. I’ve been talking about power and abuse of power.

Sexist jerks or jerks?

When I was 29 I got one of those first-class jobs as a waitron (we called it) in a night club/neighborhood bar. It was not a jiggle job. It was in an art/music/alternative lifestyle area. One of the bartenders was lesbian, as was the hostess. Another bartender was an artist. Almost all the bartenders and waitrons were artists, musicians or writers and the majority had degrees and bitter complaints over not finding work in their field or just needed the extra money. You could wear what you wanted. It was ferociously hard work, as waitressing is but it was much better than when I was 15 and worked for two weeks one summer at Shoneys until I got whipped cream from some med student’s strawberry pie on my elbow and he made a raunchy crack that had everyone at the table laughing about what they might do with a fifteen-year-old.

The job had its demeaning moments despite my being 29 and better equipped to deal with the patrons. There were a few twenty-three year olds who had some serious cute factor going and made better tips but so did the lesbians who styled no cute factor and what can I say but I’m not a talk-it-up type. I’ve always been the one that men (and women) would say to, who died and why wasn’t I smiling, then get my smile and back off and say, “Oh, sorry, ok.” But I did all right there and became head waitron. I was well-covered, as was a friend of mine who was taking a break between trips abroad to play in symphonies in countries that supported the arts and were eager for musicians. The hassling I did get was still from hell and it seemed to me that these were men and women who probably got off their up-and-coming tech job and took pride in how fast they could verbally hack up a grocery clerk or waitron, anyone in a position of “serving” them, who was thus an inferior and merited no respect. Give a customer their small change and they’d say you obviously didn’t want a cash tip, what did they want with pennies. Neglect to give back a penny and that too was going to cost you your tip. We all hated the kids who went to the really expensive university who would come in and eat and make a game of running for it the minute your back was turned. With both men and women there was a lot of, “You’re only a waitress” prejudice and seemed they were going to rub your nose hard in it that you were a service worker and subhuman.

It was an unspectacular career. There was the regular who got really drunk and sized me up as not having the kind of long legs he liked but I reminded him of his exwife and he wanted to tip me $50 and I said no and he never came back. There was the guy who wanted to pay me $50 to pour hot gumbo in his hands but things like that were rare. The place had usually a good feel to it, customers just enjoying the music. It had a congenial all knew each other feel as we all lived in the area and if we hadn’t known each other we knew some of the same people. Up until 8 pm when the night crowds started coming in, it was neighborhood people, some of whom were yes asses but that’s the way things are. I do have to confess I was probably the least liked waitron there. The owners liked me because I was responsible. When I was head waitron and the place was expanding and I was hiring for the expansion, the people I hired all complained when I quit because they said they’d taken the job in order to work with me. I thought as head waitron it was my business to make things run smoothly for them and be an intercessor between them and the owners and make sure they were taken care of and crazy things not demanded of them. But, no, I don’t think I was at all the most liked waitron with the customers. Some customers who were jerks and had been coming in for months I managed to immediately send packing. All I had to do was wait on them a couple of times and they’d be yelling, as they drunkenly stalked out the door, that they’d never had worse service, that they’d never met anyone as stupid as me, that either I was gone or they were never coming back. The bartenders would shrug and say well, they were jerks but they’d never had that much of a problem with them before, they were yeah jerks but, sigh, well, whatever, good riddance they guessed.

Here’s a tip, I own you now

Working for tips is not like a wage job, a salary job. A wage job you know what you’re going to make for what service usually. Same with salary. With tips you’re entirely vulnerable to the whim of the customer. Their peon empire is the tip jar where the customer gets to praise or flog for whatever reason. A fair number of people look at tips as wages and that they’re responsible for paying a certain amount, like a co-op agreement with the establishment to pitch in their share. (Never mind why the restaurants or clubs don’t do it. They don’t. That’s the way it is.)

Some want a show, and one day the resident owner did at a waitron meeting give a talk about the “show” we should put on, and to a degree I understood because my husband’s a musician and you do your “show” and there were theater people working there and I was writing for theater at the time. When you’re in entertainment you’re surrounded by “show”, you are “show”. But, to make it clear, we’re not talking Hooters show. “Show” meant something different. There was still some good heated discussion on the idea of “show” and the owner deflated a bit and the meeting stalled out, he flapped his hands some in bewilderment realizing he’d gotten in over his head and that was that.

There are those who think no waitron is deserving of a tip. In their peon power empire, when they pay, you don’t earn a living.

There are the people who penalize and praise with tips in ways that have nothing to do with expected labor. In their peon empire, money is especially fickle and inseparable from power. Transacting A for B service is not what it’s about. Making you feel their money is, which is teaching you their power.

While on the job I had met some people who had become friends and I’d sit and talk with them when things were slow. My husband was/is a musician and I was used to fuzzy lines as far as waitress and customer went because often times a people who follow bands consider themselves as friends with both band and night club staff. Sometimes if some drunk guys said hey sit with us a minute, if they were jovial enough and I knew they were just having fun, I’d sit a minute then get back to work and no hard feelings.

Then there was the one guy didn’t look at all the type to cause trouble. He also didn’t look drunk. He was already seated at a table with friends when I came on my shift. The waitron before me had just closed them out and said they seemed about ready to leave but they were waiting on some coffee that was brewing. I went over when it was brewed and refilled cups and said did they need anything and he said yeah, sit and talk, and I said no I’m busy. He said no wait I mean it, sit and talk, and it was an order, it was a battle of wills from the first moment he caught my eyes and I said no thanks I’m busy. He said I didn’t look so busy, he’d seen me talking. I said I’d just come on shift. He said they’d wait. I said it’s my job to get you your drinks and I didn’t sit and talk unless I knew you. You’re not going to know me unless you talk with me, he said, sit and have a drink. I don’t drink, I said and I’m busy. I was in a good mood and trying my best to defuse without antagonizing. Plus it was perplexing because he looked ok but he was staring me down, and perplexing because he was with people who frequently came in, though I’d never seen him, they were obviously friends and I’d overheard a bit of conversation and seemed he had something to do with one of the other businesses nearby, which surprised me as I’d never before seen him. He just didn’t look the type to pull this kind of shit. Have coffee, he said. All I want you to do is have some coffee with us. Nope. I’ll give you $5 to sit and talk for a minute, he said. I said no. I’ll give you $10, he said. I said no. I bet I can make you sit and he pulled out a $20 bill and said if I didn’t sit he was going to leave this tip for me. I said I was getting someone else to wait on him. He wouldn’t let it drop. Wouldn’t let the other waitrons wait on him. Someone like this is unavoidable when you’re running drinks back and forth by their table. He said he wouldn’t leave until I sat. I was trying to keep things as even keel as possible since his friends were friends of the owner. They looked embarrassed. The waitron who had been waiting on the table said he’s not normally like this, he’d always been fine with her, she didn’t know what was up. Great, I thought, I’ve somehow created an issue if he was usually ok. I promise, all I want you to do is sit and have a cup of coffee, he said. His friends said come on, sit, just for a minute, he won’t stop until you do. And I finally thought hell, sit, it’s not worth it, sit at the booth for a minute. It was a tense couple of minutes. I’ll buy you a beer. I don’t drink, I reminded him. When do you get off work, I’ll come back and we’ll go out. I’m married, I said. What did that have to do with anything, he said. Did he say he wanted to be anything but friends, he said. I reminded him he’d promised he only wanted me to have a bit of coffee and he’d stop this game. He said it wasn’t a game. I don’t remember what else he said or what I said but I finally raised my voice and had my finger pointed at his face, not realizing it, while I said whatever it was I was saying and he took my finger, which took me off guard, and he pointed it to the side and said hadn’t I ever been told not to point my finger in someone’s face.

Damn.

I thought you ass you’re right for all the wrong reasons–I shouldn’t have let the situation get to me, I shouldn’t have pointed my finger in his face. He wouldn’t stop staring and I was finally flustered. His chastising me for pointing my finger in his face, did it. I felt like it was a decided, “I’ve succeeded, you’re out of control” maneuver. And he was right. I got up to leave. He said he was going leave the $20 anyway and that there was nothing I could do about it. He left. He left the $20 on the table. He had me pegged as someone who did not want that twenty dollars, had me pegged as someone he knew it would offend if he left that $20. And he was going to leave that $20 no matter what. He was going to make some kind of hell of a point with it. Weeks later, someone mentioned he’d been drunk and was embarrassed. He never did come back in while I was there.

It was a little incident. A minor incident. Rates 0.1 on a 1 to 10 scale of Life Sux. But it’s many many years later and I still remember it and it surpasses most other incidents in memory on that job. When he said he was going to leave the $20 I should have said, great, wonderful, which would probably have closed the matter right then but it didn’t occur to me.

When I left, a refugee from some small town even further south had been working in the kitchen as the cook and we’d play cards on slow afternoons and he started drinking way too much. His pregnant punkette girlfriend one day came in adorned in a punkette wig and make-up and new punkette clothes and flashy nails. A side of her I’d not seen. She’d always been rather quiet. Now she was working as a lingerie model at one of those rather frightening looking lingerie model houses that look like a residence and had money to burn on new clothes. She was making enough that the boyfriend quit his job as a cook. It’s not a job that I could have done.

It isn’t that waitressing is “bad”. Though, indeed, the waitron is absolutely lower than you if their earnings depend on your gratuity and money is how you establish worth, and then yeah being a waitron is “bad”. Outside of that, being a waitron dependent on tips just puts one in a position of getting a true read on how many people feel about money and about power.

It is an odd job where power comes wrapped in $20 someone insists they will leave for you, that you can’t stop them. Later, for some reason, when reviewing the situation, I wanted to go, “It’s all about damn sex. Sexism. I’m female, he was male. Sexism.” But he could have done it to a male waitron. He could have been a she and done it to a female or male waitron. Pushing power is pushing power.

And, so?

People aren’t property. The older one gets the more one hopefully comes to comprehend how one’s endowment is of nature, as nature takes back little by little those things one imagined one possessed, a governance which should have been evident from birth and with which xtianity is at odds, viewing nature as in a fallen state, a thing to be subdued, dominated, controlled, improvements being one’s stamp upon it. If money is as wrapped up in power as it is, it’s mistaking nature as one’s own property, produce as personal wealth, and transmuting controlled substance into status. Law is war’s camp follower, legitimizing spoils.

After I finish writing the above, a friend of mine emails me tonight of her experience this week at the Carlos Museum at Emory, where she works, and watching Tibetan monks construct the Compassion mandala. Watching it assume form and depth with the additions of sands. Watching it swept into a pile of gray at the end, impermanence, sand taken to the nearby creek and pouring it in, returning it to the flowing water, representing a gift of the compassion contained within the days of the drawing meditation. The sand returns to the ocean.

My friend’s a gentler soul than I am. She writes of events such as this, her thoughts on them, reflections on what she views in nature on frequent walks in her semi-suburban neighborhood where there is a creek and hints of wildlife. She meditates and doesn’t go around making judgments. She writes some beautiful things.

I was thinking of dysfunctional property rights today and wealth and controlled substance as status as people as property and people working hard in different ways to make themselves desirable properties of power brokers, things that suffocate compassion and fruitlessly but tirelessly battle impermanence. She was meditating on impermanence and mandalas in her life and participating in a ritualized act of compassion.

If we both ended up at a stream today, she will feel better about the meditation sands poured into hers than I do about mine.

One early job I had was delivering for a pharmacy. Yes, indeed, this was a true neighborhood pharmacy and it did free delivery. I don’t recollect the hours but it was 13 days on and 1 day off. I delivered and the in between minutes when I wasn’t doing runs I was stocking shelves and doing the register. In Augusta, no one tipped for anything they didn’t have to and so I was a straight minimum wage laborer.

This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood pharmacy that was around the corner from the courthouse in Mayberry. Nor was it on the corner in an urban section of village. This was the strip mall south and it was the mid 70s. We’d moved from up north to Augusta GA suburbs and the set-up of the suburbs was such that they were destined for the west rim of the city, the southern rim belonging to Fort Gordon and the east rim being off-limits with plutonium somewhere over there and the north/northeast/east being the Savannah River. There was no where to maniacally meander but to the west and so that is where the suburbs popped up.

Stepping stone islands, they emerged from the terra-sea ready for professionals and their families to move in and fortress the homesteads with azalea walls. I believe the suburban design, at least in Augusta’s mentality, was to imitate plantation living as much as is possible when hill and dale are covered with broad lanes of gray carriage-way bordered with green expanses of lawn large enough to demand gardeners or a weekend hobbyist’s fanatical interest in crabgrass management. The kind of lawns that will pay an entrepreneurial kid’s way through his or her first year of college.

At suburb’s edge was conveniently located a pocket of black community from where was drawn the labor force of maids.

This was back before developers began building on flood plains so there were periodic strands of nature.

But I do mean islands. These were the outposts between the first village-styled suburbs of the early 1900s–the Hill area where were the palatial presidential resorts of the early 1900s that by the 1970s were VA hospitals and retiree room and board–and country pastures out of which sometimes roamed a cow or two to stand in the way of your school bus. “Residential” was the word. There were no sidewalks for if you didn’t own a car you should not be living there, the only buses which navigated the broad streets being for school or the morning and evening maid buses.

“Residential” being the word, there was no shopping either. Groceries and clothing and legal drugs were a once or twice a week event of driving to the east boundary of the suburbs, and going up the long hill, past the National Golf Course where all east suburban roads determined one should go, past the red brick house on the right where Pres and Mamie Eisenhower stayed during their National days, to the one strip mall in place at that time, right across the street from the golf course. Which was a long drive. Within a couple of years more strip malls popped up on what was becoming fast the horror of Washington Road. By 1977 or 1978, which was when I was doing delivery, fast and seedy strip malls and chain stores were making eastbound left turns impossible, and in front of the miles long stretch of the National there are only eastbound left turns. The movie theater at the main strip mall had gone multiplex and the little gold fish pond between it and what had once been the only grocery store that side of town was only two inches of polluted water in which lingered one die-hard annoyed survivor. Mega grocery stores had been introduced with such fierce competitiveness that people talked about how the area wouldn’t be able to support them, which was true, and the one a couple of blocks from the pharmacy is now a large Whole Life Ministries church.

The pharmacy was privately owned. Two pharmacists. One being the owner. His wife, a German woman he’d met in the service, did the books, handled the back office end. A daughter eventually became a pharmacist and took over the store before it closed. Several full time cashiers worked different parts of the store, one in the make-up section, another in the drug area. There was probably at one time a full-time person in the sweets and magazine area. There were some less well-heeled suburbs behind the shopping center and young teens would turn vagrant in the pharmacy’s magazine section after school and on the weekends. Not malt shop time. During the early and mid 70s the magazine section at the pharmacy made for eye candy and easy public socialization when stoned and there was truly not much else to do publicly than joke over the magazines. Mushrooms were plentiful in the pastures by the monolithic power towers that ran down to the river. Special recipes of lemonade and brownies made every after-school day special. I never did the lemonade as I didn’t trust the pickers. The pickers assured there was no messing up picking the mushrooms, but I was still terrified of stoned mushroom pickers one day picking a bad mushroom. And no one cared if you partook or not. One heard a lot about the horrors of peer pressure, how bad seeds lurked with malicious intent of leading you astray, but no one ever pressured me into anything. It was different if you were part of the circles with frat and sorority destinations, then, yes, I heard all kinds of horrors and the worst kind of abuses heaped on the girls who partied at the lake houses of the monied families. On the school bus on Monday mornings I a couple times sat next to girls who were in seeming shock, talking about the battery of sex and abuse they’d been through the weekend before, choosing me for some reason to talk to, crying, thanking me for listening, and at the same time still wondering if this would inch them up a few steps in the social scale toward the desired elevation. And I had friends who weren’t passed around from guy to guy on the weekends (or if they were didn’t admit it) but had abusive boyfriends who were part of those circles.

I didn’t even know the pharmacy had a delivery service until I heard about the job, which a friend of mine had before me. We were a year or two out of high school. She’d had the job during the summer and was going back off to school and she recommended me.

Delivery was to the suburbs. You became aware of the world of the suburban shut-in elderly who sat alone all day with their televisions. You became aware of who was undergoing chemo, wives (usually) answering doors brightly, smiling, thanking you, like any convenience was comfort enough in their lives to grant you laurels and praise. And you didn’t only deliver legalized drugs. You delivered Coke and milk and sometimes dropped off at the grocery store for food. You delivered magazines and often a few minutes of welcome company. There were people you were happy to talk with and others you preferred to avoid, whose racism and bitterness over the changing world made the air hot and ugly and suffocating, so when you stepped back outside it was like escaping chains, take deep breaths, find your head and feet again.

There were the couple of houses where I learned you honk the horn and let them bring in the dog before you get out of the car. The first house I was out of the car then heard something silent behind me and aware this silence I heard was deathly I was diving headlong into the car through an open window as the dog went for me and was half-way in through the window after me with sharp teeth grabbing at my jeans when a voice from an opening door called away. And there was the other house where I managed to scramble up on top of the car’s roof as a maid came out throwing coke bottles at the dogs that were after me, the bottles shattering up and down the driveway.

The car had a problem with popping out of gear when left in parked idle, which no one had told me about, and for which it was later recalled. Which was how I came to one day be delivering to a dwelling in an apartment complex, heard a pop and turned to see the car rolling back down a gentle enough hill that my first instinctual impulse was to avert disaster and so I ran after the car and grabbed its door. It rolled faster. I considered trying to open the door and I realized as I ran along the car that this was stupid, it was better to not go under its wheels, and so I stood back and helplessly watched it roll down the hill and backwards into a Cadillac. A rented Cadillac. A beauty contestant and friends came running from the intended destination of delivery screaming. The delivery vehicle had serendipitously chosen to run into the Cadillac they’d rented for a more adequate arrival at that night’s event. I was in jeans and t-shirt, holding my delivery bag. They were in floor-length frills and bouncy bouffants and it was obvious from attitude they would have scorned me just for being service-industry me, but now they also hated me as I was service-industry who inadvertently creamed the bumper of the rented car. They said they’d have my job, as they called lawyer then insurance agent. They were friends with everyone important under creation’s blue dome and would make sure I was fired.

The pharmacist acted like he didn’t care. Insurance will take care of. Never mind. Don’t worry about it. Not your fault.

I wasn’t really aware before working for the pharmacy about pharmacists keeping up with their customers’ medications. He was often the one to say that a doctor had prescribed a medication that conflicted with another one a person was on. Or to tell you that if you took this then be careful because your birth control pill wasn’t going to be effective.

Which winds around to this. I could be wrong but the pharmacist didn’t see it as his moral duty to decide what he should made available or not to a customer. It was his duty, as a pharmacist, to fill your prescriptions and make sure you knew how to take them and to make sure that your life wasn’t put in danger by two doctors prescribing medications that would interact in an ill way. It was like a private trust and when he spoke to you about your birth control or other medication that you might not be eager for everyone to know about he did so in low, confidential tones. He knew, from the prescriptions going through, who was doing better or worse. Some he filled jovially for customers, calling out how you doing, doing small talk. Other scrips he filled soberly, forehead creased with concern. With most every customer, when there was the opportunity, he’d stop and chat for a while, how were things, their family, he had a new joke.

I don’t know if he would have said no to a morning after pill. I doubt it. He wouldn’t have thought of saying no to the birth control pills. Wouldn’t have thought of saying no to the boxes of condoms. I have the feeling he would have been as likely to say no to a morning after pill as to any of the rentable crutches. It wasn’t his job to moralize, to place his god between you and your medication or birth control. Being a pharmacist was his job, his calling, his profession. His god or his lack of god had nothing to do with your god or your lack of god and your trust in him to take care with the business you brought him. He was all day dealing out chemicals that could perhaps save your life or turn poisonous in the wrong dose or mix and kill you. While he was filling scrips you didn’t interfere, didn’t interrupt. If you needed to talk to him about something you stood at the half-gate to the elevated area where he filled the scrips. He concentrated on what he was doing. You waited. He made you aware when you first started to work for him that distractions could cause mistakes so wait, he was aware you were there and would get to you when he was done.

He would occasionally take a break to bounce down, tell you a stupid joke, wait for you to whine, then bound back up and continue filling scrips.

He was crazy about Kennedy half dollars.

I”m not a Roman Catholic. I don’t believe in what Roman Catholics believe and therefore it would not occur to me to become Roman Catholic. I’m not a xtian fundamentalist. I don’t share their beliefs. A symbol that widely designates a pharmacy is that of the “Rx”, an abbreviation (I read) for the Latin “recipe”. Another symbol is a mortal and pestle. The cross isn’t one of them, not that I can recollect.

I wonder how many pharmacists who “just say no” to contraception, pleading “culture of life”, also have supported the actions against Afghanistan and Iraq?

It gets mighty murky down in the “culture of life” trenches.

During the short time that I worked at the pharmacy, the business started falling radically off. The new mega grocery store had a new mega pharmacy next to it and it was suspected that business would move to the mega pharmacy, novelty replacing personal service. Which is what happened. The goods on the shelves stopped turning over. When the woman who had worked decades in the make-up section retired no one replaced her. After I left, within a couple years the pharmacy was a ghost of its former self yet hung on, hung on, hung on a while longer, as if waiting for the shelves to completely empty, the last lipstick, the last pair of support stockings to be sold. I’m not even certain when it closed as I had left town a while before.

We currently have no cat. We have not had a cat in several years, which is unusual for us as we always had cats before. I could blog about our goldfish, and perhaps will. Tomorrow, while others post pics of their current cats I’m going to perhaps post fish pics, having already written today about our American Bobtail, Malcolm, which means I must also write about Tuesday and Stevie as they constituted the “gang in our lives for many years.

The first member of what became the gang was Stevie, our Velcro cat, gray, a raging lunatic, all teeth and claws from the first evening we got her when I looked up in the dark, from my bed, saw she had transformed from sweet kitten to bizarro lunacy staring at my face and I said,, oh no, she’s going to attack my face, she had that kind of obsessive love thing going in her eyes, and my husband replied no she won’t and instead she did, out came the teeth and claws and into my face they went. We had gotten her from a pet store (where she’d just been sent from a veterinarian’s office where someone had just dropped her off) and she was totally freaking crazy like something was quite wrong with her but since we’d taken responsibility we thought we should take responsibility for her forever. At first we hoped she’d grow out of it. She’d sometimes have seizures. It took about a year and a half but eventually she stopped ripping us to shreds and made the move from velcro to crazy glue. She had to be attached and slobbering like we were the best catnip in the world. She was still nuts and maniacally territorial. An open drawer was not to be passed up and when an unsuspecting hand reached within you still exited screaming with half your flesh in her claws, but attack mode no longer constituted 100 percent of her existence. People tried to like her but she was a tough cat to love. We’d had a gray cat before her that had died of feline leukemia before anyone, at least in Augusta (where we were at the time) had any experience with it, and that one of course had been the best cat of all time, that watched cat cartoons and met me at the corner every day when I was walking home from work. By the time we got Stevie we’d made the switch to keeping our cats exclusively inside, and Stevie was crazed and we lived with her for seventeen long years and because of this my husband swears we will never again have a gray cat.

Despite this he purchased a rose bush to mark her burial spot.

We had a beautiful Irish Setter when we got Stevie and the Irish Setter, Nessa, we one day took to the vet and told them things weren’t right and they said things were, and we took her back and said she’s sick and they said she was fine, then two weeks later she was back in and she was no longer just fine she instead was invaded with an unusual type of cancer and she had surgery and that was that. I was grief-stricken and had to have another dog soon, not a replacement because there are no replacements, but I needed another dog and we said “mutt” as Nessa, a purebred, had also turned out to have crippling hip dysplasia. We got a roly-poly half Australian Blue Tick and half English Setter whose legs were so short in proportion to its barrel body it could barely stand, and was ugly as Nessa had been gorgeous, but the sweet mom (the Blue Tick) had come over and settled her huge, barrel-chested body in my lap while we were looking at the pup and that sold me. The owner said she was sorry, the dog imagined itself a lap dog, she tried to heft it from my lap and out the room but I said hey that’s wonderful, we’re taking the blue, brown and white mottled puppy. We were told she’d had all her shots. There had been a couple others before the Irish Setter who had come with assurances of , “All shots” and within two weeks I’d have a case of distemper and a couple weeks of lotsa vet care trying to keep the animal alive and then I’d have a dead dog and lots of vet bills. Nessa had been fine and I trusted this would also be healthy pup. We took her home and on the way named her Tuesday, though we meant to name her for Wednesday of the Adams family, but since this accident happened we decided she was named for Tuesday Welch. We got a call two days later that a sibling pup had Parvo and rushed Tuesday to the vet and she was pumped full of saline fluid and promptly became very ill. I took off from work and lay beside her all day and night listening to her lungs and wishing her alive because I couldn’t stand losing another dog so soon after Nessa. She survived because of that quick soaking in saline.

Tuesday, who spent the first year gently nipping at our heels in attempts to herd us, was not quite a year old when we got a call that someone had a half-lynx and did we want it. A little black bobtail whose mother had been given away as she was killing all the birds in the yard. It was probably only about six weeks old, a little too young to be separated from its mother who’d already been given away. But we were used to raising cats from when they were young. Two of the best cats we’d ever had (they are almost all “the best cats” aren’t they) we had raised from when they were three days old as their mother had run off and so they were given to us. We’d had a dog then who had assisted us in the rearing (we fed and cuddled, it licked them all over) and this time Tuesday stepped in.

I’d called around first making sure that this would be a good cat to have indoors with other animals and was told by everyone who’d had one that bobtails are great. We now know that the cat was what is called an American Bobtail, originating from a domestic feral cat that occurs with a bobtail naturally in the wild. The first of the “breed” is sometimes said to have been found on an Indian Reservation in the southwest during the 1960s but I also read they occur spontaneously everywhere in the wild and are odd in that they so resemble each other in appearance and temperament. A totally exceptional animal known for a distinctly wild appearance, intelligence and friendly disposition.

Malcolm had long and extremely powerful back legs, shiny slick black fur that gleamed water repellant, little nub of a tail, tufted ears, almond eyes, blunt face, huge (eventually) weighing in well over twenty pounds when he was at his prime and every bit of it compact robust muscle. He had big, had claws three times the size of a regular cat. And was the gentlest most intelligent cat we ever had. Which he had better have been, considering the claws.

Whenever he met someone new, they’d pick him up, he’d gently grab one of their hands, wrap his claws softly but purposefully around the hand in display of those claws, then would retract them and purr and butt heads.

He only a couple of times scratched us, never anyone else, and the couple of times we were scratched were accidents where he was aiming to affectionately leap on one of us and miscalculated on the leap.

Malcolm sat the first three days in my lap then jumped to the floor and lay down beside Tuesday who licked him all over. Tuesday, Great Earth Mother Dog That Adored All Small Things, who we’d not yet had fixed, promptly produced milk and became his mom.

Malcolm turned off and on light switches. We would leave and return to find all the doors in the apartment opened. Big 1906 heavy wood doors. He would jump up and grab the doorknob and slam his body into the door as he twisted the knob and thus open it. Or he would jump up and tug the doorknob as he pulled it and open the door in.

He would leap from one end of the room to another. Scare you because he’d be standing way over on the other side of the room and you’d see those haunches twitch and you’d know oh god he’s going to try for it and the next second he was settled neatly on your shoulders. Whew. As mentioned above, he did miss a couple of times when very young which meant a couple scars and a cat that looked shame-faced humiliated as you screeched in pain.

Because Tuesday liked to sit out on the back stoop Malcolmwould sometimes open the back door and back screen door and let her out. We would find them both on the stoop watching the sun go down. We told friends as they entered to lock the back door behind them as the cat could get out but some would forget (we had a lot of friends coming and going those years) and then they’d go in the kitchen later and see the cat opening the back door, letting itself and Tuesday out and would say, “Wow, you were right. The cat can open the door!”

But of course.

Malcolm was a trickster. There were shelves just above head in the kitchen and he would follow me as I walked around, would be up on the shelves and pushing off objects right in front of me, in my path, for me to catch them. It was his game. Which was annoying when I was busy but other times was entertaining.

Malcolm wasn’t scared of water. He’d open the door, letting himself into the bathroom while you were bathing, you’d look and see those haunch muscles twitch and then he’d be sitting on your shoulder and chest, reaching down a paw and dabbing at the bath, fascinated by the ripples.

Malcolm would open the refrigerator door when we were out and would feed Tuesday. Tuesday would eat anything. Malcolm wouldn’t. He only ate what he needed. Tuesday would have eaten a masonite table if she could have, a dog with boundless appetite and no desire to exercise. Instead, Malcolm fed her bread, marshmallows, hot garlic chicken from the refrigerator. And for some reason only did it on Christmas Eve. Which will sound freaky but it’s true. The first time we thought it was the hot garlic chicken that had motivated him, but we got the chicken year round and he didn’t open the refrigerator until the next Christmas Eve. This happened three years in a row and we’ve no idea what the trigger was. The fourth year we tied the refrigerator door shut on Christmas Eve and that ended the refrigerator forays.

Yes, yes, I know Australian Blue Ticks are said to need and desire lots of exercise but it was as much as I could do to get the dog to walk. She wasn’t going to trot or run. She was an excellent dog on and off a leash. She just wasn’t going to hustle. An anomaly. I have since learned that Australian Blue Ticks have a vulnerability to thyroid problems and and hip dysplasia (which she was finally diagnosed as having, on top of arthritis). A lot of the things we experienced with her sound a lot like the thyroid may have been culapble rather than just the heat allergy she was said to have which lasted every year from June to November and which was fairly crippling in itself even though we had an air conditioning unit. She was lethargic and hefty. I don’t remember the vets ever mentioning anything about her thyroid and that could have been a problem. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just this way. No diet or vitamins aided and we tried anything suggested to us by anyone and their third cousin three times removed. No treatment that the vets prescribed aided.

Tuesday and Malcolm got into stuff though usually in non-disastrous ways. We knew when we came home when exceptional impishness had happened. Usually they’d all come running to the back door as we stood with keys ready to open. Yeah, I know they say dogs can’t remember from one moment to the next what they’ve done, but when we’d come home and they’d been up to no good, Tuesday would be body blocking the back door (which had a window), lying against it so we couldn’t open it, and Malcolm would be lying next to her, facing away from us, refusing to acknowledge our presence. We’d push on the door, Tuesday would grunt, we’d push some more, Tuesday would grunt some more, finally we’d shove her out of the way and she’d just lie there staring at the wall like we didn’t exist, willing us to go away and not see what havoc she and Malcolm had wrecked.

Tuesday was the Master of Gravity. She had one huge barrel chest. Australian Blue Ticks, I later read, are the one dog known to stare down a bull. That’s what they’re bred to do. That was Tuesday. They’re also not supposed to be good family animals, more an individual owner animal. But Tuesday loved everyone. And people adored Tuesday. People who hadn’t seen her for years would ask how Tuesday was doing.

Everyone always asked about Malcolm. No one ever forgot him.

Tuesday loved babies. She came across a baby bird once on the ground and whined herself sick about it, licking it, looking for some way to mother it, she didn’t want to leave its side. No, she was not going to eat it. This was just the way Tuesday was, and was so much that way everyone called her the Universal or World Mother. We did too, but we more often called her the Master of Gravity because if she decided she wasn’t going to move she would plant those legs and you couldn’t begin to budge her unless you really really really gave her a good talking to about how she was indeed going to move and she’d finally grunt, roll her eyes, take a step.

She was not a quiet dog. If she didn’t like something she would lie on the wood floor and beat that tail on it like it was a fifty pound anvil. Flap. Grunt. Flap. Louder grunt. Flap. Much louder grunt. Usually over food or wanting to be petted though she wasn’t going to go to the bother to come over and ask. And Malcolm always lying by her side when he wasn’t stretched out in one of our laps or hunting mischief.

Everyone loved Malcolm and Tuesday.

Malcolm would play a game with every new dog that someone brought in the house. As soon as he was alone with the visitor he would corner it. He did this to a half-wolf. He did this to every dog. We’d hear whimpering and go in to find the dog in the corner and Malcolm sitting on the opposite side of the room like he was up to nothing, staring at the wall, and the dog whining refusing to move. As soon as we entered the gig was up, the game was over, Malcolm would stand and stretch and jump and rub against your leg as he strutted out and from then on he’d be sort-of buds with the visitor, now that it knew its place.

Malcolm acted like this was entirely innocent on his part.

Malcolm, looking for attention, would come up and head butt your calves with such force he’d nearly push you down. Purring all the while. A loud motor purr you could hear two rooms away. But a squeaky meow. This big cat would open its mouth to meow and out would come this teeny little squeak, also characteristic of the feral bobtail.

Malcolm helped keep Stevie about as reasonably sane as she would ever be. She was ferocious and never gave that up though she had become a cat that liked her head to be buried in one of our armpits. An exterminator once stepped on Tuesday’s tail and Tuesday squeaked and Stevie went running and cornered the exterminator in the hall before I could reach her and lock her up. The half-wolf visitor and Tuesday were one evening lying side by side and they bumped each other, squeaked in surprise, and Stevie came running and backed the half-wolf into the kitchen before I could grab her and lock her up. Once she had it in her mind to get you, that was it, I would have to retire her to a side room. She was an attack cat. Territorial. If she looked out the window and saw another cat a half block away she’d go haywire wanting to claw it to bits. Once she slipped out the door between our legs and went straight after a cat that had been lazing on a car in view of her for several months. She bounced up onto the car, came down on the unsuspecting cat with all claws raking, and though we snatched her quickly enough no damage was done the neighbor’s cat didn’t go back outside for months.

After we’d had Tuesday twelve years I turned up pregnant, quite unexpectedly and wonderfully so. After Son was born, Tuesday would look at him like he was the best thing in the world that had ever happened. When he started crawling she was beside herself with careful delight. When he started playing with her she was dopey with love. She had arthritis and hip dysplasia and had an increasingly tough time just moving around, and she’d never been happier. All she wanted to do was lie in the doorway of the room where I was with Son, Malcolm alongside her, and beam beautiful beatific thoughts. She’d stare, smile, come in and sniff, lick, beam her eyes at him and up at me, smiling, smiling, go back to the door where Malcolm was and lie back down. The last couple of months during which Son was old enough to play with her, she smiled back and forth between me and him and wagged that tail every waking moment.

It was the evening before we were getting ready to go on the road for a long tour. We were going to be gone several months and had prepared for people to take care of Tuesday and Malcolm and Stevie. My husband had been out on the road a lot but I’d not been out on the road in a while. Husband had to be on the road and we weren’t going to sit at home and have him miss several months of Son growing up. We’d been buying extra things to prepare for taking a child on the road, a lot of packing going on. We had taken all the animals to the vet and all had clean bills of health. Preparations pretty much done, late afternoon, I lay down and took a nap with my son. I dreamt there was an ocean and in the ocean were tubular glass pipes and they made the most beautiful harmonies though not melodic, each an individual voice. Then one stopped harmonizing. Went wrong. Made an odd sound. Stopped working. I tried to investigate, to get it to work again, but it wasn’t happening. I was then in a house shed above the ocean and a leg broke out from under the shed and it started to go down. Then I was in a small boat riding down a stream and was passing the different civilizations in the world, all ghost civilizations, stretching way way back into history’s dawn. Genetic precursors of different nations camped with their animals along the river. It was a farewell ride. A death ride for someone else on the boat.

I woke up and heard a faint, dry rasping sound in the hall. I knew immediately, before going to look, Tuesday was dying. She’d had a stroke. She died that night. The next day I was sitting with a neighbor in the bedroom and we heard a crack and the house shook and my neighbor leaped screaming as she thought it was an earthquake. Instead it was half a huge tree that had been destined to fall onto the bedroom where we were but hit another smaller tree along the way and was deflected, scraped the bedroom roof and then crashed into the room behind, huge trunk and branches spearing the roof.

Workmen arrived. So did the bus to take us off on tour. There was no time to mourn Tuesday’s death. But I didn’t mourn. It wasn’t like Nessa twelve years earlier. We had said good-bye. She’d had a long time being a happy dog.

Malcolm mourned Tuesday for months then became our son’s fast friend. Followed him everywhere. After several more years he started getting slow. At fourteen he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Now, after all these years, we were informed his heart was also congenitally wrong, too small for his large frame, the reason for the failure, and there was likely nothing to be done. He went quickly.

Stevie, we knew, wouldn’t last much longer. She mourned. She never got over it. She was about seventeen. We got up one morning to find her dead. No warning. Just gone.

Each of the deaths was rough on our son. We thought we’d take a break afterwards. We still had Sachi, a cat we’d gotten a few years before our son was born (another story), but she didn’t like children, she wanted more than anything else to be around no children and so we gave her away.

Now we have no dogs, no cats. After the team of Tuesday and Malcolm and Stevie we’ve just not been able to commit to another dog or cat relationship. Not yet. Plus, the apartment we now live in is small and what we used to put into vet bills now goes into our son’s needs. He’ll want a cat or dog someday I’m sure, but right now we’re making do with goldfish. He asked for a couple of Comets last year and we got him Dorothy and Dylan. They grew like crazy and demanded a much larger tank. Dorothy turned up egg bound last summer and died and thus now we have Dylan and Dorothy 2 (a fantail) and Nero (a calico fantail) and Kerry (another smaller comet type). They know us. They wave hello every time we wander by, wanting us to feed them. They live to eat and to flaunt their tails.

We enjoy the fish but for us it’s a different thing when a fish “crosses over” than when goes a cat or dog. Son was still last year struggling to cope with Malcolm’s death. When Dorothy 1 died, despite his thinking she was a marvelous, beautiful fish, despite his having named her after Sesame Street’s Elmo’s goldfish, he was content to look at her out of the tank, suggest different ways of reviving, then settle on a decent tupperware burial in the garbage bin (I know, yes, hideous of us, but we live in an urban apartment).

It took some time getting used to a pet that never closes its eyes–not when it sleeps, not when it dies.

Driftglass in What this liberal sees looks back at 9/11 and draws this comparison:

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate — leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn’t act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

There is a meme currently making its way around the blogosphere which begins with, “My uncle once…”

The first email I got that day was from a friend at the time. he had just heard from his family. Didn’t have confirmation on it yet. But it was believed his great-uncle was a co-pilot on the first plane that spun off into oblivion, hitting the towers. That was about all the email consisted of. “My great-uncle…”

It had been his great-uncle.

“My uncle once…”

He was one of those, afterwards, with an intimate connection to 9/11, who was enraged by Bush. As he had been beforehand. 9/11 didn’t change his mind.

But, of course, we have all an intimate connection with 9/11. I knew that as I watched the first tower collapse to the ground and as it fell, my body commanded some empathetic harmony, my knees bending, the tower going down, so did my knees bend and down I went with it to sit upon my heels, thinking here it is, the future, this will be Ground Zero for this generation, all that they will be told and know is that History began today, they will be told today is the center of their universe and all the reason for what will follow. Looking at my son who was only three-years-old, I thought this is the moment that will bind your generation together, they are sewing it as a shadow to your feet even now, and it will accompany you relentless throughout your life, for you to eat with it sleep with it, they will contrive for it to be your measure of all that is, what they will have to tell you about it.

So that day it became my future to daily, as they bound that shadow to his feet, clip it and place it where it belongs. So that instead of them pushing him from behind with that shadow, it would be set across from him, so that he might be able to view it face-to-face when he came of age.

I didn’t then know about the Patriot Act, Afghanistan, Iraq. But I knew they were coming. And that my job would be to cut 9/11 away from my son and their thousands daily missions to make it his parent, he its child, which they would plan to be such an intrinsic and understood history that he would never question its reality, unconscious of any other life force. Yes, he would be intimately connected with 9/11, as are we all, but I could follow behind him daily cutting the strings they would spin between he and that shadow in their attempt to make it the puppet master, and he its doll, they infusing that shadow with the dead and daily acting as false mediums planting oracles. Set that shadow before my son and remove the mask of those dead so he could understand it was the instead the living whose voices rattled the death gourds.

My son doesn’t know I daily follow him about unthreading that shadow from his feet. When an adult, he will have no idea. Sitting across from that shadow, he will think why did I inherit this, why is this my business, why must it be at my table, why didn’t your generation kill this, why did you let it happen, I don’t want it. He won’t know the difference between facing that shadow and hav